Lose the lawn

Andrew Majawa and his wife, Candice, watch as their children play on the artificial lawn outside their North Vancouver home. They had grass taken out and replaced with high-tech artificial turf .

Photographed by:Mark van Manen, Vancouver Sun

Is it time to get rid of your lawn and try something different? It might be hard to imagine what you would have instead of a lawn, but there are all sorts of creative alternatives.

In West Vancouver, for instance, Chris and Rick Alexander have a lawn of white micro-clover.

When they finished renovating their home on Fulton Avenue and putting in new drainage, their old lawn and garden were pretty much destroyed.

Instead of re-turfing with grass, they decided to try sowing micro-clover — a newly developed form of clover that has softer stems and is shade tolerant, as well as considerably drought resistant.

At the time, the makers of the new seed were reluctant to sell it without mixing it with 10 per cent grass seed, so the Alexanders were forced to buy it as a clover-grass mix.

“I wish we could have done it all in clover,” Rick says. “The clover has been fantastic; it is the grass that is the problem now because it doesn’t look like the rest.”

Nevertheless, the Alexanders are happy with their decision and have found that their new clover lawn stays green all year round, even through the drought days of summer. It requires less watering, no fertilizing and is easy to trim.

“People are always stopping to ask us about it,” Rick says. “We cut it once a week. The original plan was not to cut it at all, but we find a trim once a week in summer keeps it looking good.”

The Alexanders bought their seed from David Wall of Premier Pacific Seeds, who is introducing it to the Lower Mainland.

“Many years of breeding and selection have resulted in revolutionary micro-clovers,” he says. “When it is combined with grass, the micro-clover spoon feeds the grass with nitrogen, making a lawn healthy and vigorous.”

The white clover also crowds out weeds, preventing new ones from getting established, and stays green all year round. “And nothing tolerates mowing like micro-clover does because of the unique dense structure of the leaves.”

In North Vancouver, Andrew Majawa went a different route when looking for a lawn alternative and opted to install a completely artificial, plastic grass lawn.

It has been a few years since he had the fake lawn installed, but he says he still can’t help smiling when he sees his neighbours out busy weeding and feeding and mowing their real grass.

“We had a lot of shade because of trees and it made it difficult to grow a nice lawn. The grass always looked a little scrappy, “ Majawa says. “It took me a while to decide because it is quite pricey, but I ended up going for it and I’ve never regretted it.”

Andrew and his wife, Candice, have two children, aged seven and five, who are still able to run and play on the artificial turf.

One of the most beautiful non-grass lawns I ever walked on was in South Africa at Babylonstoren, a Cape Dutch farm with vineyards and orchards in the Draknestein Valley, near Stellenbosch, where an old grass lawn has been transformed into a super fragrant, verdant camomile lawn. It was a delight to walk on and I imagine even nice to picnic on.

In my own garden, I have taken out all but a tiny patch of boulevard grass, and replaced the lawn areas with paving or planted borders or lush ground covers. In the back garden, I replaced a lawn area with sandstone pavers inter-planted with plain green dwarf mondo grasses.

It is quite common for gardeners to slowly remove lawn to make way for new planting schemes and to save time on basic maintenance and care, but also because lawns are often not a good use of space.

In her new book, Lawn Gone! Low-maintenance, Sustainable, Attractive Alternatives For Your Yard, American writer Pam Penick points out how In the late 1800s, Frederick Law Olmstead, the founder of American landscape architecture, sought to elevate the homesteader’s basic esthetic of bare dirt, vegetable patch, and fenced yard for keeping out livestock.

“Olmstead looked to the greenswards of grand English estates and envisioned an uninterrupted carpet of lawns spread across new suburban developments, unbroken by fence, hedge or wall — a commons shared by each homeowner, whose civic responsibility included maintaining his own piece of it.

“Drive the neighbourhood streets of almost any town in North America today and you’ll see Olmstead’s vision brought to life with one lawn flowing into the next all the way down the block.”

There have been benefits, of course. Lawns have created a visual continuity through neighbourhoods, which in turn has promoted the idea of connectedness, but lawns also tended to smother creativity, as well as devour water and fertilizer — not to mention the noise pollution of lawn mowers.

Today, many people have taken back their boulevards and replaced grass with plantings of perennials, ornamental grasses, drought-tolerant, no-mow ground covers, even vegetable patches.

Penick says there is a “greener way” that makes more sense. “Most people hardly use their lawn, especially the front lawn and it can seem an awful waste to maintain something that you never use.”

“Other types of plants also do a beautiful job of covering the space and many of them require less water and maintenance. Simply by choosing to grow several different species of plants in your yard, you’ll help reduce the ‘lawn desert,’ a monoculture of turf that afflicts so many neighbourhoods.”

One of the simplest and easiest ways to replace a lawn is to use paving or slab-stones or gravel and to work in planting areas to soften the overall look. Done properly, it can look very attractive and provide paths and sitting areas.

In England, Beth Chatto, a well-known garden guru, created a world-famous garden out of gravel and drought-tolerant plants dotted here and there.

In San Francisco Bay area, garden designer Rebecca Sweet replaced a thirsty lawn into a sun-drenched Mediterranean-style garden with decomposed-granite paths flowing through. She used lavender and artemisia and lamb’s ear along with ornamental grasses to achieve the look she wanted.

In another place, she replaced a lawn with a meadowy mix of fescue grasses to create a swirling texture of shaggy grasses that required mowing only once a year.

Perhaps this is the year you consider doing something else with the space your lawn occupies. There are plenty of alternatives.